In the 1980s, Hollywood film enacted a backlash against feminism
that was evident in the detective film through the representation of
troubled masculinity masquerading as tough and triumphant and through
the representation of women as demonized or excluded from the center of
the screen. Neo-noir films like Body Heat (Kasdan 1981) dealt with the
female threat by offering women cinematic space only to present them as
evil and destructive for the male hero; on the other hand, cop-action
films like Lethal Weapon (Donner 1987) excluded them from the center of
the narrative altogether through the focus on a buddy relationship and
presenting women on the margins as damsels in distress that needed to be
saved by the hero. Although each film offered a different response to
the perceived masculine crisis incited by women, both relied on the
highlighting of sexual difference with a focus on the female body as
seductive and dangerous and the male body as empowered and heroic.

During the early 1990s, however, mainstream film saw a shift to
"sensitive men" heroes (1) in a negotiation of changing social
attitudes towards masculinity that was mirrored in the detective film by
the appearance of protagonists defined by brains instead of brawn.
Because detective-heroes no longer had to be gun-wielding, law
enforcement types that embodied a heroism defined as white, muscular,
working-class, and male--like Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) in Lethal Weapon
or John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard (McTiernan 1988)---the
detective film explored new kinds of heroes who were a more realistic
size, shape, and age. The detective-hero did not need to be tough so
much as smart to bring the new highly intelligent criminals of the 1990s
to justice and this included African-American men, for example Denzel
Washington in The Bone Collector (Noyce 1999); older men, including
Clint Eastwood in Blood Work (Eastwood 2002); and women, such as Sandra
Bullock in Murder by Numbers (Schroeder 2002).

Following the success of The Silence of the Lambs (Demme 1991),
Hollywood film saw an increasing presence of the female detective on
screen. This shift away from white hypermasculinity would suggest a more
liberal and feminist approach to the definition of law enforcement
heroism. However, while the detective genre has brought women to the
center of the narrative with a seemingly greater degree of agency as the
protagonists who drive the narrative action forward, this agency is
tempered and contained. The male detective is empowered in the
contemporary detective film through his identification with the serial
killer--the man who has the desire and ability to inflict violence on
women--while the female body remains a site of objectification and
powerlessness. This is not, however, necessarily due to the cinematic
serial killer's tendency to seek out female victims, but because
the female detective succumbs to an over-identification with the
killer's victims and often is a former or potential victim of
violence perpetrated by men.

In the serial killer film, masculinity is still regarded as the
embodiment of strength and heroism and the female body, weakness and
victimization. Thus, the female detective is portrayed as competent and
successful only as a masculinized or defeminized woman; when she
exhibits feminine traits--usually emotional--she is branded as a
professional failure. While The Silence of the Lambs was generally
regarded as "a profoundly feminist movie" (Taubin,
"Grabbing" 129), the reviews of 1995's Copycat expose the
possibility of dual readings of the serial killer film with a female
protagonist (or two in the case of this film). Lizzie Francke of Sight
and Sound praised the casting of Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver as
the film's protagonists--detective and the potential victim--as
"enhancing its status an instant post-feminist classic" (51);
conversely, Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times argued that the casting led
the filmmakers "to believe that they'[d] made a significant
feminist statement, the movie's two hours-plus of almost continual
sadistic abuse of women notwithstanding" (1).

Similarly, more recent serial killer films offer some of
Hollywood's toughest and attractive female stars appearing
repeatedly in the genre--for example, Ashley Judd and Angelina
Jolie--offering strong female characters while, simultaneously,
undermining their agency through casting them as the former or potential
victims of male violence. While the male detective is given a position
of stability and agency through his identification with the perpetrator
of the crimes, the female detective is presented as objectified and
victimized. The female body--of the detective as well as the
victim--thus functions as a site of the working through of masculine
anxieties incited by a female presence in the traditionally masculine
profession of law enforcement.

A NEW KIND OF DETECTIVE

Hollywood has been obsessed with murder for the last decade and
even more so with serial murder. Films like The Silence of the Lambs
(Demme 1991), Copycat (Amiel 1995), Citizen X (Gerolmo 1995), Seven
(Fincher 1995), Just Cause (Glimcher 1995), Serial Killer (David 1995),
Kiss the Girls (Fleder 1997), The Bone Collector (Noyce 1999), American
Psycho (Harron 2000), Along Came a Spider (Tamahori 2001), Blood Work
(Eastwood 2002), Insomnia (Nolan 2002), Red Dragon (Ratner 2002), Murder
by Numbers (Schroeder 2002), Twisted (Kaufman 2004), and Taking Lives
(Caruso 2004) focus on a detective's investigation of serial
murders. The serial killer has captured the popular imagination because
he--and the serial killer is most often male (2)--is the most violent,
most gruesome, and most elusive of criminal types. He does not kill for
the traditional motives of jealousy, greed, and power but because he is
psychopathic--often resulting from a traumatic childhood experience
related to a mother or other female figure--and cannot refrain from
killing until he is stopped by the law. Hollywood may be obsessed with
the serial killer as the perpetrator of contemporary crime; however,
this is a misrepresentation of the reality of criminal behavior as
serial killers account for only a fraction of the national murder rate:
murder accounts for only 0.27% of felonies in the FBI's Index of
Serious Crime (Livingstone 40). (3)

The crimes of the serial killer strike fear in the popular
imagination because they appear motiveless; he does not necessarily
choose people he knows as his victims but strangers--innocent people.
The detective's investigation of the killer's crimes functions
to demystify the seeming motiveless and random killings by attributing
to them a pattern--and thus a motive. The motivation for the killings is
often attributed to an abusive childhood or major trauma that then has
been repressed and resurfaces in the compulsive need to kill. The
killer's pattern or MO (modus operandi) functions as a
"signature" that can identify the seemingly invisible and
elusive killer and, as Richard Dyer argues, the appeal of the serial
killer for film audiences is the attempt to discern this pattern (16).
However, the serial killer narrative is merely the formalization and
simplification of a pattern established in classical detective fiction
by authors like Agatha Christie: the killer only means to dispose of one
victim but then is forced to kill others who stumble onto the truth of
the crime and threaten to reveal the killer's identity. The
pleasure for the viewer of the serial killer film is, thus, to identify
the pattern and, therefore, the killer before the detective does. The
detective narrative, however, also offers reassurance to its audience:
the pattern of the killings, in a reflection of the killer's
psychological state of mind, produces a motive so that even seemingly
"motiveless" crimes can be understood and resolved. No matter
how chaotic and dangerous contemporary society seems to be, the
contemporary detective film assures audiences that there is a hero who
can restore order or normalcy to the society disrupted by the killer by
identifying and removing that "abnormality" through death or
incarceration.

Real-life serial killers are often described as "abnormally
normal" (Seltzer 10): in other words, they appear normal to those
who know them but obviously are abnormal in their need to commit
multiple murders. According to novelist Patricia Cornwell, "the
most distinctive and profound characteristics of all psychopaths is that
they do not feel remorse. They have no concept of guilt. They do not
have a conscience" (27). (4) As a society, we label serial killers
as pathological, insane, and abnormal in order to differentiate them
from us and our supposed normalcy. The detection of the serial killer in
the contemporary detective narrative, thus, functions to identify the
abnormal that masquerades as normal so that it can be extracted from
society and presumably contemporary crime with it. According to Patrice
Fleck, the serial killer film is Hollywood's response to the
national conversation about crime--a conservative discourse that points
to a degeneration of morals as the cause of this kind of violent crime
(35). As Woody Haut argues, contemporary crime fiction turns "the
fear of violent death into a narrative subtext while investigating the
society from which that fear derives" (207). Haut identifies that
fear as an end-of-the-millennium obsession with personality disorders,
sexual deviancy, and AIDS (209). The serial killer is a silent one--he
is not easily recognizable and it takes the trained eye of the detective
to identify him. As Steffen Hantke notes, the killer's evil is not
written on his body (36); instead it is the body of the victim that
becomes the abject one, written upon by the killer and thus becomes a
text to be read by the detective-and a spectacle to be beheld by the
audience.

It is also our increasing reliance on technology and the isolation
of contemporary urban living, however, that makes us vulnerable to the
anonymous killer. As Suzanne Hatty explains, films centered on serial
killers can be regarded as a cinematic response to the contemporary fear
and anxiety about victimization and public safety that has been evident
since the 1980s (83). And as Gerard Collins discusses in relation to
Patricia Cornwell's novels, serial killers are "the embodiment
of a disease that permeates modern western society: isolation"
(159). Our growing cities produce increasing proportions of crime and,
at the same time, individuals are more isolated despite the burgeoning
of electronic technology. While that technology may improve global and
instantaneous communications, it deters interpersonal interactions
especially with the people who we are surrounded by everyday: our
increasing reliance on voicemail, e-mail, cell phones, and text
messaging decrease our face-to-face communications.

The serial killer plays on this fear of alienation by suggesting
that the greatest threat to the individual is the anonymous
"other" who may be a neighbor or a stranger but whose evil is
imperceptible to us. However, the contemporary detective film assures us
that, while science and technology may be responsible for our
vulnerability to the serial killer, the detective has mastered the
science and technology to track, identify, and stop him. These films
rarely offer the "pleasure" of alignment with the killer in
his perpetration of violence--as the horror film does--and, instead,
focus on the post-mortem examination of the killer's violence and
align audiences with the detective-hero and the pleasure of detection.

The serial killer is both incredibly intelligent and brutally
violent, and what is needed to stop him is a very special kind of
detective-hero: "the 'profiler,' the genius like
investigator able, on the basis of clues at the scene of the crime, to
narrow down the social and geographical location of the killer as well
as his psychological make-up" (Dyer 17). Whether a forensic
scientist, psychologist, medical examiner, or homicide detective, the
hero of the contemporary detective film is the "criminalist."
He/she must possess a diverse range of skills and specialized
knowledge--an expert not only of forensic science, behavioral science,
and profiling, but also culture in general. As the criminalist expert,
Lincoln Rhyme, explains in the novel The Bone Collector:

The criminalist is an expert in analyzing "trace"
evidence but, more importantly, an expert in human behavior and that is
how he/she tracks down the killer: he/she is--as the title of Michael
Mann's 1986 film suggests--a "manhunter." The appeal of
the criminalist is his/her knowledge and use of science and technology
in an era defined by information technology and there has been a
proliferation of criminalists in all forms of the detective
genre--fiction, film, and television. (5)

Although the fictional serial killer has become a popular trend in
mainstream film since the early 1990s, America's obsession with
serial killings is far longer than its dominance in mainstream film
would suggest. The 1980s saw the proliferation of the serial killer
narrative in fiction, most notably in the novels of Thomas Harris, at
the same time as American society began to note the burgeoning of real
serial killers. A fascination with real killers led to a barrage of TV
movies beginning in the 1970s and snowballing in the 1980s as real-life
cases became fodder for the mass audience. (6) What distinguishes the
big screen version of serial killing since the early 1990s is that the
majority of the serial killers on screen are fictional and the violence
they commit exponentially increased. The TV-movies of the 1980s--whether
dramatized accounts of the real-life killers or documentaries--offered
the stories of brutal murder but not the image or violence of it because
they were aimed at prime-time audiences. In contrast, the serial killer
films from the 1990s on have relished in lingering close-ups of
mutilated corpses whether at the scene, in autopsy, or in crime scene
photos.

THE SPECTACLE OF THE "GROSS"

In her discussion of the "body genres" of porn and horror
films, Linda Williams argues that there is a "system of
excess" with a "gross display of the human body" (3).
Similarly, the serial killer film (as an offshoot of the horror genre)
offers a visceral pleasure for the audience and something that the
serial killer narrative in fiction can only achieve to a degree: a
spectacle of the gross in relation to the representation of the human
body. Mark Seltzer identifies this impulse as a product of our
contemporary "wound" culture, "a culture centered on
trauma (Greek for wound): a culture of the atrocity, exhibition, in
which people wear their damage like badges of identity, or fashion
accessories" (2). Wound culture is evident in Western
culture's obsession with the violence of death perpetrated on the
human body--with the penetration of the body and the making visible of
the inside of the body through wounds, violence, and autopsies. This
obsession with bodily trauma is evident as passers-by rubberneck at car
crashes and as people patronize controversial art exhibitions, such as
the "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, which
included Damien Hirst's collection of dissected and preserved
livestock displayed in glass cases. Even the public autopsy has made a
reappearance recently: in London in 2002 Professor Gunther von Hagens of
Germany invited 500 spectators to view the first public autopsy in
Britain in 170 years (Wardell A16). The emphasis during the autopsy was
less on the scientific or the medical and more on the performative as
Professor von Hagens wore a black fedora and blue surgical gown; the
autopsy was shown on giant screens inside the gallery; a television
network said they would broadcast edited footage; and the organs of the
deceased were passed amongst the spectators in trays. Similarly in film,
violence is no longer merely shown exacted and somebody killed, but is
lingered over in close-up as bodies are dissected and innards exposed in
autopsies.

Our desire for trauma is manifested in our cultural texts through
the spectacle of the gross. The visualization of death and mutilation
has escalated in frequency and detail in the last decade or so in
popular culture as our alignment--as spectators and consumers--has
shifted from the perpetration of trauma to its investigation. The
committing of the violence tends to be withheld, leaving such horrors up
to the imagination of the viewer--for example, the atrocities committed
by Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs are not revealed;
instead, the mutilated corpse and its relevance to the investigation of
a crime have become the focus of cultural narrative. At the time when
Seltzer was writing Serial Killers (1998), ER was the most popular
series on television and the prime example of what Seltzer describes as
"pure wound culture." The most popular show in 2003 and 2004
was CSI and, it too, is representative of the same impulse to indulge in
the gross. ER offers its audiences "an endless series of torn and
opened bodies and an endless series of emotionally torn and exposed
bio-technicians" (Seltzer 22)--the spectacles that make up wound
culture. Seltzer argues that the appeal of wound culture seems to be its
spectacle where private desire and public fantasy intersect; because it
offers a private motivation for public violence, for example childhood
abuse, wound culture gives comfort to viewers that there is a reason for
violent trauma (257-58).

Similarly, the criminalist narrative (including the serial killer
film and shows like CSI) offers cadavers as spectacular bodies with
gaping wounds that repulse and attract simultaneously. The cadaver is
read as a text to determine what caused the body to pass from life into
death and, on CSL this reading leads to an oral--accompanied by a
visualized--reconstruction of the crime in which the cadaver is seen
alive and then killed again. These sequences are done with digital and /
or computer generated effects; for example, the camera / viewer follows
the passage of a bullet through a wall and into the head of a sleeping
child or witnesses the impact of an axe into a skull from beneath the
blade.

In the serial killer film of the last decade, the horrors
perpetrated by the killer that were hidden in films like The Silence of
the Lambs are not only exposed but indulged in as cameras offer these
extended and hypergraphic scenes of mutilation. In Murder by Numbers,
the young killers in eerie, astronaut-like suits choke the life out of a
panicked victim and blow the brains out of another; in Twisted, a
victim's face is so viciously battered that the detective only
recognizes the corpse by a tattoo on his hand; and in Taking Lives, the
disfigured faces of the victims, their wrists sawn off at the hands, and
the photos of the crime scenes are given lingering and detailed
close-ups. As Amy Taubin notes, in The Bone Collector, the foregrounding
of the investigation "allows director Phillip Noyce to display
hideously mutilated corpses and to fetishize the details--skin carved,
burnt, or bitten down to the bone--in giant digitized close-up.
We've come a long way--technologically speaking--since
Blow-Up" ("Death" 136). This embodies a kind of
pornography of violence, a fetishization of the body--especially the
female body--in death rather than sex. Rather than necessarily being
offered as an erotic object, the female body becomes a text to be
objectified, analyzed, and probed in order to identify the real enigma
of the narrative-the male serial killer. While this spectacle of
violence, death, and disfigurement of the female body as a victim of
male violence facilitates a working through of contemporary anxieties
about crime and law and order, its coupling with the representation of
the female detective also allows a contemplation more specifically on
gender roles in contemporary society.

The detective film of the 1990s saw a repositioning of the female
body from fatal or absent to ever-present following a shift of the
central relationship of the narrative. The neo-noir detective film, like
Basic Instinct (Verhoeven 1992), focuses on the relationship that
develops between the hero and a femme fatale, and the cop action film,
like Lethal Weapon, on one between the hero and a buddy. On the other
hand, the serial killer film with a male protagonist sees a focus on the
relationship that develops between the detective and his adversary. The
spectacular body of the neo-noir was that of the erotic and dangerous
femme fatale, for example Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct; however, it is
the white male--muscled, stripped off, and violent--that was the body of
spectacle in the cop action film as the space for the expression and
negotiation of masculine crisis. Whereas the neo-noir films of the 1980s
cast the woman in the role of the criminal--as the desire but also
potential demise of the male hero--the serial killer narrative
reconfigures the female body as the victim-not unlike the horror film.
Rarely is a romantic relationship the focus or conclusion of the serial
killer film with a female investigator or her body presented as erotic
spectacle; instead, the work of bodily spectacle is relegated to the
female corpse.

The diegetic world of the film is one that is saturated with signs
and, from a self-awareness of the text, it follows that those signs are
loaded with meaning and should be read as such. As Walter Burket argues,
human beings "create perceptible signs which act to stabilize the
common world as it has been formed by language and cultural
tradition" and one such system of signs to reveal meaning on the
surface, at a visual level, is the marking of territory and the body
(165). The main spectacle of the serial killer film is the
"work" of the killer--a code or language--that, if analyzed
and interpreted correctly, gives clues to the killer's identity and
his moral project as exhibited through the body of his victim (Fleck
39). Just as the serial killer is almost always male, so too is his
"work" almost always performed through the female body. The
female body, thus, rather than offering a visual opposition to the manly
physique of the hero or being a sexual object to be desired and
dominated by him, functions as text. A "literacy" between the
serial killer and the detective is established whereby the killer
produces a system of symbols through his victims that the detective must
decipher in order to stop and capture the killer (Fleck 35): the female
body then becomes a mode of communication for the two men--one as author
(the killer) and the other as reader (the detective). The
detective's reading of the text, or profiling, is "an attempt
to appropriate the text's language in order to identify the
author" (Simpson, Psycho 80). In reading the text, the
detective--like a semiotician--tries to discern the patterns of the
author's "writing" and, through unraveling and
recognizing those patterns, discern the identity of the killer.

Fans of the criminalist narrative are rewarded for their devotion
to the genre as they are invited by the text to read the signs alongside
the detective and to try to solve the mystery before he/she does;
however, the genre has also reached a new level of self-consciousness
due to audience familiarity with the conventions / signs of the genre as
well as its increasing popularity in fiction, film, and television. The
language, rules, and ritual of investigation in the criminalist film or
show include the crime scene kit, the "Luminol" and
ultraviolet light that exposes blood, the "cracked" chest and
weighing of organs in the autopsy, the lifting of "partials"
(fingerprints), the magnification of fibers and hair "tags"
(skin on the end of the follicle), the killer's MO, and
"unsubs" (unknown subjects) at the scene. The ritual is so
familiar that more recent films like Murder by Numbers engage in a
postmodern play with the audience who knows the language of the
criminalist narrative.

The high school student killers in the film, Richard (Ryan Gosling)
and Justin (Michael Pitt), plan the "perfect murder"--i.e.
motiveless--to prove the "freedom" that Justin discusses in
his in-class presentation, an allusion to Nietzsche's concept of
the "Superman." In doing so, the film references
Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope in which two young men kill simply to
prove that they can get away with it. Hitchcock's film as well as
two others--Compulsion (1959) and Swoon (1992)--were inspired by the
real-life murder of Bobby Franks committed by Nathan Leopold and Richard
Loeb in Chicago in the 1920s (Fuchs 117-18). Justin and Richard read up
on forensics, plant false evidence, and attempt to construct an MO that
will lead the police away from them as suspects. However, the detective
on the case, Cassie (Sandra Bullock), recognizes the inconsistencies of
the falsified MO and Richard and Justin's real or unconscious MO In
other words, the profile they try to establish through the killing and
trace suggests an unorganized and impulsive killer while their own
profile, as organized but inexperienced killers, is also apparent--to
the trained eye. Where once the killer unintentionally left behind clues
to his identity through his killings, now he often stages his
"work" in order for it to be read in a specific way with its
audience--the detective-hero--in mind. The popularity and familiarity of
the genre with audiences has lead to new incarnations of the genre in
order both to capitalize on its popularity and also to make individual
films seem different and innovative.

It is this last point that is most likely the motive for the
current trend of serial killer films starring female detectives. The
younger white male detective gave way to the African-American male and
older detectives and now to the young, white, female detective. While
this would suggest that the genre is attempting to offer a feminist
message, as Barry Keith Grant argues, film's presentation of black,
female, or gay characters is often merely a substitution for the white,
male hero and does "little or nothing to challenge the sexist or
racist assumptions that inform the myths by which they operate"
(196).

VICTIMS IN A MAN'S WORLD

In terms of the representation of the female detective, some early
serial killer films of the early 1990s--like Blue Steel (Bigelow 1990),
The Silence of the Lambs, and Copycat--were praised for their feminist
narratives that saw empowered women at the center succeeding in the male
world of law enforcement and putting a stop to the violence perpetrated
against women by the killer. While the female detective has remained a
staple of the serial killer genre and the presence of a women in the
role of protagonist (or partner to a male detective) should articulate a
positive image of women onscreen, the serial killer film tends to
contain or overturn a feminist theme through two strategies: the
over-identification between the heroine and the victim, and her
"masculinization" (and related problematic relationships with
men). The male detective tends to be presented as a stable and
self-controlled individual--for example, Morgan Freeman's Detective
Somerset in Seven or Alex Cross in Kiss the Girls--or, if presented
initially as traumatized or in crisis--for example, Denzel
Washington's Lincoln Rhyme in The Bone Collector, Al Pacino's
Will Dormer in Insomnia, or Clint Eastwood's Terry McCaleb in Blood
Work--then the hunt for the serial killer and his eventual demise at the
hands of the detective function to restore and revitalize the
hero's self-confidence and prove his masculinity.

On the other hand, the "problem" of the female detective
is that she has had to become masculinized in order to succeed in the
male sphere of law enforcement--a masculinization that occurs because of
trauma stemming from her relationship with her father or to her previous
victimization at the hands of a violent man. Her salvation--i.e.,
"re-feminization"--occurs by the end of the film, not so much
through her pursuit and execution of the killer, but often through her
acquiescence to a "healthy" / heteronormative relationship
with a male love interest. Hillary Radner argues that the masculinized
or de-feminized "psychofemme" of the 1990s--for example, Sarah
Connor (Linda Hamilton) of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron 1991) and
Margie Gunderson (Frances McDormand) of Fargo (Coen 1996)--offered a
strong and independent model for women, one not dependent on sacrifice,
acceptance, or re-education demanded in melodramas and comedies (248).
In a continuation of this strong female model, the contemporary
criminalist is also masculinized or de-feminized and offers a resistance
to male violence by tracking and bringing to justice the male serial
killer. While detective films with a male protagonist focus on
investigating the masculinity of the hero, those with a female
protagonist are concerned with examining their heroes struggle as women
in a man's world trying to balance a professional and personal
life--and losing.

The representation of the female detective in the 1990s and 2000s
serial killer film follows on from the themes of the 1980s detective
film with a female lawyer as a detective figure, including Jagged Edge
(Marquand 1985), Suspect (Yates 1987), The Accused (Kaplan 1988), Class
Action (Apted 1991), and Guilty as Sin (Lumet 1993). As Cynthia Lucia
explains, the female lawyer appeared to be a feminist model--as a
professional, powerful, central female character--but her representation
was in truth a result of the glossing over of reactionary impulses to
feminism. Despite her alliance with the law, the female lawyer--like the
femme fatale--was presented as "dangerously ambitious";
however, this masculine trait and her independence were denied by her
presentation as "personally and professionally deficient"
(Lucia 33). In terms of her professional life, the female lawyer was not
necessarily competent and was often forced to defer to male authority or
was proven wrong by a male colleague; in terms of her personal life, she
was not whole but flawed and tended to be married to her job, unable to
attain happiness or fulfillment until she found a child and/or love
interest.

Similarly, the contemporary female detective has risen through the
ranks because she has sacrificed the traditional female roles of wife
and mother to pursue a career in the male sphere of law enforcement.
Rather than being a nurturer to a man, she is a threat to him as
competition in his professional life. While she may excel at her job,
she tends to dress like a man (or not in a feminine manner), is sexually
aggressive, and has no desire for a committed relationship. Whether or
not this is acceptable behavior for a woman in American society in the
twenty-first century is beside the point as for Hollywood this can
signify nothing other than that she is neurotic and unhappy even if she
believes otherwise. In other words, the female detective can only
succeed at her professional life if her personal life suffers. While
this is not necessarily a new trope for the genre, it is certainly
highlighted in the contemporary detective film as this representation of
women seems out of date in today's climate of female advancement in
professional circles.

Her struggle to operate in a man's world is more acute in the
case of the serial killer narrative as the detective often has the
potential to become a victim of the man she hunts. The films of the last
decade with female detective-heroes explore two issues or conflicts
related to her sex and her presence in two male dominated worlds: that
of law enforcement where the majority of detectives are male, and that
of the serial killer where the killer is male and the victims are almost
always female. (7) The female detective appeared with increasing
frequency along with the shift from the action-cop to the criminalist
detective; however, the female detective presents a problem in the genre
because of her appropriation of the male position in mainstream film.
Linda Mizejewski argues that

There seems to be a need in mainstream film to contain the
representation of women in the same instance as giving her voice
expression. (8) In the action and detective films of the late 1980s and
early 1990s--for example, Blue Steel, The Silence of the Lambs, and
Point of No Return (Badham 1993)--the woman's fear is that, through
the appropriation of the male position as detective (i.e.,
"dick") and male weapon of the gun (i.e., phallus), she
suffers a loss of femininity--or at least the ability to perform it
successfully. In Blue Steel, Megan (Jamie Lee Curtis) looks
uncomfortable and out of place in her evening dress when out on a date
compared to the confidence she exudes when in her masculine uniform; in
Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) undermines
Clarice (Jodie Foster) and her self-confidence when he identifies her
cheap shoes and perfume; and in Point of No Return, while Maggie
(Bridget Fonda) is proficient in street-fighting and firing a gun, she
needs lessons in how to walk, dress, and present herself convincingly as
a woman. This construction of female heroism in the early 1990s through
signifiers associated with established notions of male heroism may
account for what Mizejewski sees as the "lesbianization" of
the female hero--aligning her with "illegitimate" notions of
femininity in order to mediate her accession to heroism.

The female body is constructed in mainstream cinema almost always
in terms of sexual display for the male gaze, but, in many of the
detective films of the 1990s, the female body is presented less as an
erotic object and more as spectacular--either in death as the female
corpse or in action as the female detective. The Bone Collector opens
with a familiar scene: a woman sits at the window while a man is shown
in bed and a police officer's uniform, gun, holster, and boots lay
on the floor beside the bed. The implication is these tools of the law
enforcement trade belong to the man in bed; however, in a reversal of
gender roles, it is Amelia (Angelina Jolie) that is the cop and her
lover who complains that she is commitment phobic. He accuses her of not
being emotionally involved enough in their relationship and that the
night they just spent together was "another slam bam thank you
'mam'--he being the one who has been used. This reversal
establishes Amelia as masculinized, and, therefore, it is not surprising
that she turns out to be a tough and competent cop who readily
dispatches the killer when he attempts to kill the male detective,
Rhyme. Similarly, in Murder by Numbers, Cassie (Sandra Bullock) is
presented as more masculine than feminine: she wears gender non-specific
clothes, most often a turtleneck or T-shirt with trousers and a black
"pleather" jacket, little make-up, and her long hair is
usually tied back for functionality. Cassie and her new partner, Sam
(Ben Chaplin), represent a role reversal: she is the sexual predator in
the relationship and he is the one who asks, "What about what I
want?" Cassie's nickname given to her by her male colleagues
on the force is "The Hyena"; the female hyena has a mock penis
and Cassie acts as if she possesses a phallus.

In Kiss the Girls, Kate McTiernan (Ashley Judd) is originally one
of the killer's captives but later becomes his hunter and is also
somewhat masculinized. She is shown in kickboxing class: her muscles
gleam and flex under the stress of her combat as her fists and feet find
their marks; her body is revealed in a sports top and shorts during
these sequences of action rather than stripped off or in feminine garb
and in positions of passivity. In fact when she is held captive by the
killer--drugged up and tied to the bed--her body is disguised beneath a
baggy sweater. In Twisted, Judd plays a homicide detective, Jessica
Shepard, who investigates a string of killings to which she is
intimately involved--all the victims are men that she has had sexual
relations with. Like Bullock's Cassie in Murder by Numbers,
Jessica's uniform is jeans and turtleneck sweaters under a leather
jacket. Her hair is short and she is presented as pretty--but also
pretty tough. She is a sexual predator, roaming bars for passionate
one-night stands with strangers. In Taking Lives, the film begins with
Special Agent Illeana Scott (Angelina Jolie) portrayed as a smart and
skilled behavioral scientist and her self-control and confidence is
echoed in her put-together outfits--dark slim-fitting shirts, dark
trousers, and a blazer or leather jacket--and her hair tightly wound
back. Even her name--she answers her phone with her surname,
"Scott"--and her cool handling of her black Mustang
convertible in a car chase suggest she is masculine. Like, Jessica and
Cassie, Illeana is a highly sexualized woman and she develops what she
describes as a "favorable reaction" to the lead witness, Costa
(Ethan Hawke)--eventually having a night of passion with him. Although
she wears a wedding ring--suggesting that, unlike the majority of female
detectives, she has found a balance between her professional and
personal life--she confesses to Costa that it is a prop, worn to ward
off male advances.

The female detective is often presented as a masculinized woman;
however, the most effective strategy to contain the agency of the female
hero is to place her in the position of victim, or potential victim, at
the same time as that of hero. In Kiss the Girls, Kate is one of
Casanova's victims: she was stalked, kidnapped, drugged, and would
have been raped and / or killed if she had not escaped. She uses her
strengths to gain not only her freedom from his dungeon, but also the
ability to face him again. As such a strong and admirable character,
Kate defies the traditional representation of a woman in this type of
film where women tend to be the helpless victims; however, in her
showdown with the killer, it is the male detective, Alex Cross (Morgan
Freeman), who must come to her rescue and shoot the killer as Kate lies
helpless on the floor. Kate--despite her strength and martial arts
skills--is ultimately a victim rather than a successful
"manhunter." Kate is also not a professional detective; she is
a medical intern who gets involved in the case after being the only
victim to escape and this allows greater latitude with her
representation.

In Taking Lives, Illeana in introduced as a very successful and
talented profiler from the F.B.I. The Montreal detectives--Duval and
Paquette--to whom she has been assigned to assist find her, not at the
airport, but in the grave where the victim was buried. One of the
problems with the film is that it never fully develops or explains this
and other aspects of what the film's official website identify as
her "intuitive, unconventional approach" and "unorthodox
methods" (takinglives.warnerbros.com), like the posting of crime
scene photos above her bed, in the bathroom, and on the chair opposite
her at dinner; however, the process of lying in the grave would suggest
that Illeana is attempting to align herself with the victim. Similarly,
at Martin's childhood home, Illeana discovers a basement room where
it is implied Martin was confined and she lies in his bed. She tries to
identify with Martin, whom she begins to regard as a victim himself--a
victim of an obsessive and cruel mother--only to be attacked by Martin
who is hiding under the bed. Her renowned abilities as a profiler are
called into question by her fellow detectives and herself as, to her
horror, Illeana discovers that the witness--and the man she has fallen
for--is, in fact, the killer she seeks. With her realization that she
has been seduced by the killer, she begins to unravel emotionally, a
loss of confidence mirrored by her increasingly disheveled appearance
with her long hair loose and in tangles, and her eyes red and rimmed
with tears. Although the film begins with her as a strong character, her
inability to identify the killer correctly and his ability to seduce her
so easily portray Illeana as a woman successful in her profession but
weak when it comes to men; it is her femininity that makes her
vulnerable and almost one of Martin's unfortunate victims. However,
the usual cause of the female detective's inability to be both
professionally and personally successful in the serial killer film is
most often cited as a past trauma involving violence perpetrated by men.

In Murder by Numbers, Cassie's single-minded pursuit of the
killer and her abandonment of a personal life in favor of doing her job
may mark her as a masculinized woman, but they are identified as a
result of her past as she was once the near-victim of a killer herself.
Her former abusive husband stabbed her seventeen times in an attempt to
kill her and this attack haunts her life in every aspect. In her private
life, she sabotages any relationship that brings any man too
close--"That's Cassie's MO" her ex-boyfriend
explains to her new partner Sam. In her professional life, she
over-identifies with the victim and, as her boss explains, the detective
must identify with the killer in order to catch him, not with the
victim. Cassie's close alignment with the murdered woman (indicated
by Cassie's referral to her by her first name) leads to her being
pulled off the case. Cassie must deal with her own victimization in
order to move on with her life, but she avoids it at all costs. When
asked by Sam why she became a police detective,

she lies and says it was because someone she knew was killed; and,
when later she recounts her traumatic past, she refers to herself in the
third person. She also uses a nickname and her maiden name, Cassie
Mayweather, to differentiate herself as a detective from the victim she
was as Jessica May Hudson. By meeting face to face with the killers in
this case, fighting them, and bringing them to justice, Cassie is able
to rewrite her past with a new sense of herself as a survivor. However,
it turns out that her own experiences did cloud her judgment as she was
convinced that Richard (the boy who reminds her of her husband) was the
real villain, and killer, rather than the loner Justin with whom she
self-identified. She concludes her rehabilitation by facing her former
husband as a witness at his parole hearing and, when called as
"Jessica May Hudson," Cassie answers.

Whereas Cassie used Sam for sexual gratification at the beginning
of the film before literally kicking him out of bed, the film suggests
that with her coming to terms with her past as victim, she will now
embrace a normal relationship with Sam. This concern with
"deviant" sexuality is also made explicit through the
"unhealthy" relationship that emerges between Richard and
Justin. The real-life killers, Leopold and Loeb, were rich, young men,
and also lovers; while Murder by Numbers does not suggest that Richard
and Justin engage in a homosexual relationship, it does imply that had
Justin's teenage exuberance been channeled in the more usual
direction of sexual interest girls, he would have never turned to murder
as a hobby. He says suggestively to Lisa, the girl he likes, "If
only I had met you first." She comforts him saying that, left to
his own devices, he would not have killed--that Richard "seduced
him" into it.

While Cassie is haunted by her near-fatal experience at the hands
of her abusive husband, the masculinization of the heroines of The
Silence of the Lambs, The Bone Collector and Twisted is blamed on the
violent deaths of their policemen fathers at the hands of criminals. In
The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice (Jodie Foster) successfully navigates
the patriarchal men who test or challenge her presence in law
enforcement, brings the killer that eludes the male police and agents to
justice, and concludes the film without abandoning her career and / or
taking a more socially prescribed role as the "significant
other" of a man, a role that would lead to marriage and motherhood.
In the classic horror movie, Diane Dubois notes, the female protagonist
is often recovered through being "rescued" from her career by
the hero through marriage and motherhood or through her
"abandonment of career-based ambition," but that The Silence
of the Lambs demands its protagonist does neither (305). On the other
hand, The Bone Collector ends with Amelia recouped into this more
traditional role. She effects Rhyme's emotional rehabilitation as
he does not carry out his plans for his "final transition"
(commit suicide) and is reunited with his long estranged friends and
family by Amelia. More importantly, Amelia has suppressed her masculine
sexual appetites apparent at the beginning of the film to be
Rhyme's non-sexual companion. He is a quadriplegic and sexual
intimacy between the two occurs only through the stroking of his finger
that maintains feeling. The conclusion of Twisted also sees its
heroine's femininity recovered as it is suggested that Jessica will
embark on a meaningful and exclusive relationship with her police
partner, Mike (Andy Garcia).

NEW TWISTS IN THE GENRE

The more recent contributions to the genre, Taking Lives and
Twisted, present a shift from the majority of serial killer films with
female detectives that preceded them. Both films present a serial killer
that preys on male rather than female victims and this, in turn, should
present a shift in the representation of the female detective away from
being the potential victim of the killer and male violence. In Twisted,
Jessica is not a potential victim but a suspect in the case as the
victims were men with whom she had intimate relations. The past trauma
that haunts her is that her father--also a police detective--committed a
series of murders that concluded with her mother's murder and his
own suicide. It is revealed by the end of the film, however, that it was
not her father that committed those atrocities when she was a child, but
her seemingly benevolent guardian and police commander (Samuel L.
Jackson). He did not like the men that her mother was pursuing and
dispatched them; similarly, he does not like the men that Jessica sleeps
with and is killing them. Jessica does not suffer from an unhealthy
alignment with the victims--fearing that she may become one; instead she
develops an unhealthy alignment with the killer--fearing that she may be
the one committing the murders, not unlike her father. Once she
discovers the truth that it is her guardian not herself or her father
who is / was the murderer, Jessica is "cured" of her
neurosis--and, thus, her masculinity. She is able to become
feminized--i.e., vulnerable--and fall in love with Mike.

In Taking Lives, the victims of the killer are men because the
killer wants to be someone else with a life different from his own; he,
therefore, kills in order to take their place and live their lives like
a hermit crab, as one of the detectives notes in the film. Illeana does
not suffer from a childhood trauma; she appears to be confident and
stable. She does not over-identify with the victims and remains
professional in her following of the case; however, she does form an
attraction to the killer--although unbeknownst to her. While she appears
masculinized in the first half of the film, her traumatic realization
that her lover is the killer sends her into a self-destructive spiral
signaled by her increasingly "feminized" appearance. At the
end of the film, she comes to embody hyperfemininity as she appears to
be seven months pregnant with Costa/Martin's twins. He confronts
her in her farmhouse hideaway and viciously attacks her--beating her,
kicking her, strangling her, and ultimately stabbing her in the belly.
What was interesting about this scene is the effect it had on the
audience. At the screening I attended, the audience--myself
included--was visibly and audibly disturbed at the sight of a heavily
pregnant young woman being beaten so viciously. For Illeana/Jolie to
engage in a fight with the killer seems to be acceptable to the audience
only when she is masculinized; when she is feminized to this extreme
degree, an incompatibility arises between her role as mother-to-be and
"manhunter." However, this image of the detective as
feminized--the horrifying image of a pregnant woman being attacked and
beaten--is only a masquerade; Illeana is not pregnant but only pretends
to be in order to lure Costa/Martin to her so that she may exact justice
by killing him in self-defense. Thus, the disturbing nature of the scene
dissipates with the realization that Illeana is still a masculine woman
merely utilizing the masquerade of femininity to achieve her desire--to
kill Martin outside the bounds of the law.

These more recent additions to the serial killer film offered new
"twists" in order to attract viewers now familiar with the
subgenre's conventions: Taking Lives and Twisted offer male killers
who pursue male--rather than the usual female--victims. Twisted also
attempts to surprise viewers by directing suspicion onto its female
detective-hero who is, of course, revealed to be innocent of the crimes.
One film of recent years, however, has broken with the conventions of
the trend not only by presenting a serial killer who is a woman but also
by making the killer--rather than a detective--the film's
protagonist. Monster (Jenkins 2003) stars Charlize Theron as real-life
killer Aileen Wuornos and, rather than having a detective's
investigation as the driving force behind the narration, the film
focuses instead of the desires and crimes of the female killer. The
film's critical success--Theron won both the Golden Globe and
Academy Award for Best Actress--and box-office success as an independent
film--earning over $34 million (www.imdb. com)--may cause Hollywood to
reconsider the focus and formulation of the recent serial killer film.
However, much of the interest in the film, no doubt reflected by the
awards the film won, was in the film's success at transforming the
female body at the center of the narrative. Rather than the bodies of
Wuornos's victims, the film offers Theron's as the spectacle
of the narrative. Theron--hailed as one of Hollywood's most
glamorous actresses--was successfully transformed into the Florida
prostitute-turned-killer with the help of make-up, greasy hair, crooked
teeth, thirty pounds of weight gain, and a dramatic change in her
physical posturing to disguise her years of ballet training. In other
words, Wuornos/ Theron is masculinized not only because her inattention
to her looks, her unfashionable clothes, and her physical carriage are
non-feminine, but also because she commits what is traditionally male
violence--i.e., serial murder--and engages in a non-hetero-normative
relationship with another woman. However, at the same time, the film
presents its killer as sympathetic--and, to some extent, justifies her
actions--because she is the victim of male violence herself. Thus, while
Monster deviates from the current mainstream trend with its focus on the
killer--and a female killer at that--it does retain an emphasis on the
female body, the masculinization of the female protagonist, and
depicting women as the victims of male violence.

WOMEN CAN'T HAVE IT ALL?

The female detective tends to be presented initially as extremely
successful at her job: she is an intuitive and astute observer and
tracker. Her failing tends to be in her personal life; she is unable to
develop a satisfying and committed relationship with a man because she
is married to her job or because she or her father was the victim of
male violence. However, a shift occurs during the film whereby the
female detective's inability to form a normal relationship with a
man comes to impede her ability to perform her job--as in Murder by
Numbers and Twisted--or she becomes the intended or potential victim of
male violence--as in Kiss the Girls and Taking Lives. Her personal life
intersects with the professional and leaves her vulnerable and/or unable
to do her job well. In Murder by Numbers, Cassie is pulled off the case
because she develops an unhealthy identification with the victim and
dislike for Richard; in Twisted, Jessica is regarded as the most likely
suspect as her father was a killer and she slept with all the victims;
in The Bone Collector, Amelia is pulled off the case by the police chief
as she attempts to play detective instead of keeping to her place as a
beat patrol cop; in Kiss the Girls, Kate has escaped from the killer
once but becomes his target again at the end of the film; and in Taking
Lives, Illeana misreads the case and embraces the killer as a lover
instead of recognizing him for the serial murderer he is. Like the
female lawyer protagonist of the 1980s, the female criminalist is still
plagued by the seeming inability to have both a healthy personal life as
well as a strong professional one, most likely because her function in
contemporary film is still to process and negotiate male anxieties
centered on the proliferation of women in traditionally male spheres of
public life.

The majority of Hollywood serial killer films that have populated
the big screen for the last decade do not present a necessarily
challenging message and, instead, tend to offer the serial killer as a
sacrifice to the detective to restore order in society. As Philip
Simpson explains,

In the serial killer narrative, a sense of community and consensus
is created by the sacrifice of a few victims when the abnormal element
of the society--the killer--is identified and removed from that
society--through death or imprisonment. The detective is also redeemed
through the sacrifice of the victims as the male detective is able to
validate his masculinity and/or competence as a detective through
hunting and identifying the killer; the female detective, on the other
hand, has the added pressure of having to be successful in both her
private and professional lives--and is unable to do so. Through the
tracking and killing or bringing to justice the serial killer, the
female detective is able to prove her abilities as a detective and
affect her own "cure" for her neurosis that has plagued her
adult life, stemming from the childhood trauma of losing her father to
violence or being the victim of male violence herself. The symptom that
she is cured--or at least partly responsible for her cure--is that the
female detective has given up her obsession with the loss of her father
or the violent men of her past to pursue a healthy, normative
relationship with a good man--often her partner from work. The films
leave the heroine at this moment of balance--success in both her
professional and personal lives--i.e., a happy ending.

One cannot help, however, but suspect that having dealt with the
traumatic past event that drove her to be a detective, our heroine may
lose her ambitious--and "masculine"--drive in terms of work.
Similarly, now that she has found romance and stability with her
partner, the female detective will no longer be able to indulge in the
single-minded pursuit of the killer. The lone male detective of the
serial killer film remains unattached at the end of the narrative; like
the Western hero, the detective must remain unencumbered by romantic and
familial entanglements if he is to remain effective as the detective
that operates on the margins of society--on the thin blue line between
crime and the law. The female detective, on the other hand, is expected
to give up her independence and work with the team--especially her
partner. The sacrifice of the serial killer's victims--and
ultimately the serial killer himself--functions to highlight and work
through many contemporary anxieties of women in the traditionally male
workplace. While the female detective may prove her abilities as a
"manhunter," she is ultimately contained or her success
devalued through a reinscribing and containment of her professional
ambition and aggressive sexuality in the contemporary serial killer
film.

The author gratefully acknowledges that financial support for this
research was received from a grant partly funded by Wilfrid Laurier
University (WLU) Operating funds and partly by the SSHRC Institutional
Grant awarded to WLU.

(2) As Christian Fuchs notes, the FBI assume that less than 5% of
all serial killers are women, and those that are mainly kill direct
relatives: Aileen Wuornos is "the great exception" (188).
Similarly, the cinematic serial killer is almost always male and there
are only a few exceptions, including Eye of the Beholder (Elliott 2002)
starring Ashley Judd as a fictional serial killer and Monster (Jenkins
2003) starring Charlize Theron as real-life killer Wuornos.

(3) For further discussion of the liberties taken in representing
the fictional serial killer in film see Carl Goldberg and Virginia
Crespo, "A Psychological Exaimination of Serial Killer Cinema: The
Case of Copycat," Post Script 22.2 (2003): 55-63.

(4) Emphasis in the original.

(5) The criminalist is the protagonist in the fiction of authors
like Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, and Jeffrey
Deaver; in films like Kiss the Girls and Blood Work; and on television
with series like McCallum (1995 to present), Silent Witness (1996 to
present), and Prime Suspect (1990 to 1996) in Britain, Da Vinci's
Inquest (1998 to present) and Cold Squad (1998 to present) in Canada,
and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 to present), CSI Miami (2002 to
present), Crossing Jordan (2001 to present), and Law and Order: Criminal
Intent (2001 to present) in the United States. Several documentary
series have also cashed in on the popularity of the serial killing and
forensic investigations, including IR: Cold Case Files (part of the
Investigative Reports series [1991 to present]), American Justice (1992
to present), Medical Detectives (1998 to present), and City Confidential
(1998 to present). Unlike the criminalist narrative in fiction and in
film, the ones on television rarely present investigations of serial
killers and instead bring the contemporary fascination with forensic
investigation to the traditional cop show.

(6) These TV-movies include The Deadly Tower (Jameson 1975) about
Charles Whitman, Helter Skelter (Gries 1976) about the Manson Family,
Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (Graham 1980) about Jim Jones,
The Executioner's Song (Shiller 1982) about Gary Gilmore, Out of
the Darkness (Taylor 1985) about "The Son of Sam" killer David
Berkowitz, The Deliberate Stranger (Chomsky 1986) about Ted Bundy, The
Case of the Hillside Stranglers (Gethers 1988) about Kenneth Bianchi and
Angelo Buono, Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker (Green 1989) about
Richard Ramirez, To Catch a Killer (Till 1992) about John Wayne Gacy,
Murder in the Heartland (Markowitz 1993) about Charles Starkweather and
Caril Fugate, and Citizen X (Gerolmo 1995) about the Russian killer,
Andrei Chikatilo. For more details about these TV-movies, see Christian
Fuchs's Bad Blood: An Illustrated guide to Psycho Cinema (New York:
Creation Books, 2002).

(7) In Twisted and Taking Lives the serial killer's victims
are men. This seems to be the newest evolution of the genre and this
gender twist enacts a shift in the relationship between the detective
and the killer but also the victims and is a theme I will explore later
in the paper.

(8) This is a trend or need similar to that of containing black
masculinity in the contemporary serial killer film. The black detective
may outwit the evil serial killer, but his sexuality, race, and ability
to perform heroic action--unlike those of the traditional white
hero--are held in check or left undeveloped. For further discussion, see
Philippa Gates, "Always a Partner in Crime: Black Masculinity and
the Hollywood Detective Film" Journal of Popular Film &
Television 32.1 (Spring 2004): 29.

Grant, Barry Keith. "Strange Days: Gender and Ideology in New
Genre Films." Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender at the
End of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Murray Pomerance. New York: State U of
New York P, 2001. 185-99.

Hantke, Steffen. "Monstrosity Without a Body: Representional
Strategies in the Popular Serial Killer Film." Post Script: Essays
in Film and the Humanities 22.2 (2003): 34-54.

Taubin, Amy. "Death and the Maidens--A Series of Serial
Killers: The Loss of Innocence, Mobility, and Air." [Review of
Felicia's Journey, The Bone Collector, and Oxygen] Village Voice
(16 November 1999): 136.

--."Grabbing the Knife: The Silence of the Lambs and the
History of the Serial Killer Movie." Women and Film: A Sight and
Sound Reader. Eds. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd. London: Scarlet Press,
1991. 123-131.

A criminalist is a renaissance man.
He's got to know botany, geology,
ballistics, medicine, chemistry, literature,
engineering. If he knows facts--that
ash with a high strontium content
probably came from a highway
flare, that faca is Portuguese for
"knife," that Ethiopian diners use no
utensils and eat with their right hands
exclusively, that a slug with five land-and-groove
rifling marks, right twist,
could not have been fired by a Colt
pistol--if he knows these things he
may just make the connection that
places the [unknown subject] at the
crime scene. (Deaver 120)

the "problem" of the female investigator
is most easily resolved through
familiar heterosexual strategies: the
excessive fetishization and domesticization
of the female detective in
V.I. Warshawski (1991); the imposition
of a romantic subplot [...] in The
Stranger Among Us (1992); the glamorization
in Impulse (1990); the heterosexual
partnership in Rush (1992). An
alternative resolution of the female
dick problem in cinema has been to
represent her as a Hollywood version
of the lesbian, thereby associating her
with another kind of "illegitimacy."
(6-7).

While sensational depictions of violence
can radically subvert cultural
ideology, the latest serial killer films
typically construct their sensationalism
from a conservative political
stance that allows for commercial
success. Thus, while the films radically
appear to transgress taboo, especially
in their depiction of violence,
they actually serve to uphold a patriarchal,
law-and-order status quo derived
in large measure from a repressively
patriarchal heritage. ("Politics"
119)